Transcript of "How To Be A Space Hacker" - talk from the Chaos Communication Camp in Zeigeleipark Mildenberg in 2015

1. Good morning everyone, thank you all for coming out this morning to hear my talk
My name is Mike Caprio and I'm a software developer, instructor, and community
organizer, just like many of you out there in the audience. But since I first
became involved in space hacking 3 years ago, I've been an adviser for NASA and
the White House office of science and technology policy, and was selected for a
brainstorming team focused on rallying the world's resources to defend the Earth
from asteroids. And I'm here to tell you that you too can become a space hacker!
I d like to start with a short video from earlier this year
Since 2012, NASA has annually held the International Space Apps Challenge - a
mass collaboration focused on space exploration that takes place over a weekend
at locations all across the globe. It s the largest hackathon in the world,
and it s a completely locally organized, grassroots, volunteer event; NASA
puts forth the challenges and provides guidance, but all the funding, logistics,
and solution making is done by unpaid volunteers. Anyone from the general public
is invited to attend, and NASA requires that no admission be charged for
attending.
I ve had the privilege of organizing all four events in New York City with the
help of local non-profits and I m proud to say we have established an 1100
member space hacker community, with around 300 members active in a Meetup.com
group. NASA chose New York to be the global mainstage for Space Apps in 2014 and
in 2015, and this year was our most successful event yet with nearly 400 people
attending. In addition to our annual hackathon, we also hosted NASA s first
Women in Data bootcamp, aimed at increasing diversity and participation in
hackathons, and our inaugural space conference of renowned speakers - all of
which you can find on YouTube at the Space Videos link at the bottom.
This year we were invited to hold our event at Microsoft s headquarters in
Times Square, where they gave us two floors of the building all weekend long for
the hackathon and conference.
We had people lining up as early as 5:00 a.m. to take part, and our space
hackers produced close to 30 projects with one of our teams producing a global
prize winning solution.
So I ll just show you a few of NASA s mission briefing statistics for Space
Apps. You can see this year s participation was just overwhelming, truly
worldwide participation, and a great deal of it right here in Europe.
Here you can see the explosion in growth over four events in a three year
period. Almost 2500 projects have been created in three years, and tens of
thousands of people have taken part.
And we re not just talking about techies participating. Only about one third
of attendees self-identified as software developers, and the rest were a broad
mix of diverse, interdisciplinary people. Space Apps is in many ways a misnomer,

2. as it s not just about apps and it s not all about space - many challenges
have to do with solving problems right here on Earth regarding issues around
climate, agriculture, and clean water. Solutions to challenges can involve
robotics, data visualization, hardware, design, and educational curriculums or
displays.
This diverse mix of people is exactly what NASA is looking for. They want to
crowdsource new ideas, and they want them to come from voices outside of their
mainstream. And this is why they initiated their Women In Data bootcamp, and
followed it up with their Datanauts program. I m also proud to say that Space
Apps NYC has been gender balanced and diverse from our very first event - and we
even were able to provide on site childcare for all of our participants this
year.
All solutions built at the event must be submitted under an Open Source
Initiative license that permits the free and open dissemination of the work.
Just like everything else NASA produces, all the projects created at Space Apps
must be placed into the public domain for anyone in the world to use. You can
access any of NASA s resources at the four sites here and use their work for
any purpose, even commercial ones. So you might be thinking to yourself, okay, a
space hackathon is pretty cool, but do you really get to work with NASA? I m
here to tell you that the answer is yes, you absolutely can work with NASA.
Teams from all over the world over the last three years have been approached by
NASA after Space Apps, and have even been offered the potential of contracting
to continue their work on their projects.
I ll offer the recent ISEE-3 reboot project as further proof to show that NASA
is happy to work with outside parties. If you didn t hear about this last
year, a small team of space hackers, led by Dennis Wingo, raced between ground
stations all over the world in an attempt to salvage an abandoned NASA
spacecraft from 1976 that observed the solar winds and was redirected to fly
through the tail of a comet.
Dennis Wingo is probably the ultimate space hacker - he specializes in
resurrecting decades old technology, and he does it with small teams of so-
called amateurs. His team reconstructed a radio using GNU radio software to
reestablish contact with the ISEE-3, was able to execute several maneuvers with
it, but ultimately discovered it had lost its fuel and the team could not bring
it back to a stable orbit. But as long as his team was able to continue meeting
the  gating  requirements that NASA established for their mission, NASA
continued working with them. NASA wants to work with the public and to further
commercial space initiatives!
NASA will even launch satellites for you - and if you meet the requirements of
the CubeSat Launch Initiative, they will launch it FOR FREE as an auxiliary
payload on one of their regular missions.
The CubeSat design is a modular system, 10 centimeters on a side, that can
literally contain any kind of equipment, up to a designated weight.

3. A variety of types of CubeSat have been successfully launched, using equipment
like Arduinos and smartphones for computing power, and all manner of sensors and
systems.
You may have heard of Bill Nye the science guy, and his recent Lightsail
Kickstarter project, which is testing the use of solar power for propulsion of
CubeSats - this slide is out of date, since his Lightsail raised something like
a million and a half dollars in crowdfunding.
But it s not just NASA who s looking to collaborate with the public in the
exploration of space. Last year, Space Apps NYC was approached by the American
Museum of Natural History to help them organize their first ever overnight
hackathon -  Hack The Universe  under the Hayden Planetarium. The museum
wanted to innovate and make its data available for participants to make open
source visualizations and tools that would ultimately become exhibits or
research aids.
I have to say there is probably nothing cooler than space hacking next to an
actual meteorite.
This was only the second time in history that the museum allowed adults to stay
overnight.
And of course, if you need to hack throughout the night, there s only one
beverage of choice to drink, and I made sure it was there!
About 30 projects were produced in just over 24 hours using the museum s
 known universe  API, which you can access for yourself at the link below.
Another project that the American Museum of Natural History has been working on,
in collaboration with Link show ping University in Sweden, is an open source
suite of space simulation tools collectively called OpenSpace. The museum wants
to grow an open source development public community around these tools, which
can be used on any platform to render actual simulations of outer space, as
recently occurred during the New Horizons flyby of Pluto. Who wants to make a
space game on a VR headset??
This video is a demonstration of OpenSpace showing the New Horizons / Jupiter
gravity boost, combining NASA telemetry with actual images of Jupiter to show
how the mission performed taking images of the red spot.
You can learn more about OpenSpace and take part in its development by signing
up for the AMNH mailing list at the link here, or directly on Link show ping's
web site below
Lastly, I d like to mention that true to the mission of NASA s incubator
innovation goal, I m in the process of creating a space technology accelerator
program in New York City, and I m calling it Empire Space Labs. I m

4. currently working with a stealth hardware startup, and a company called SpaceVR.
SpaceVR is launching a 3D, 360 degree virtual reality camera to the
International Space Station, and is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to
pay for the launch costs - the successful launch of  Overview One  into
space will be a turning point in the new era of virtual exploration of space,
allowing anyone with a smartphone, tablet, computer, or VR headset to experience
what it s like to be an astronaut. SpaceVR will work with Nanoracks for launch
services, Made In Space to 3D print the housing of the camera on station, and an
ISS astronaut to assemble the camera and film content with it. And if anyone
here in the camp has a VR headset, I d be happy to hook you up with some
really cool unreleased footage taken by SpaceVR cameras.
So I d like to invite everyone to come hang out at the SpaceVillage! You can
come buy a model rocket, check out some awesome do it yourself space hacker
projects, and chat with us about the future of space exploration. We ll be
having a chill party on Saturday night, with free food and drinks sponsored by
SpaceVR!
Thanks for coming out!